


John Sheppard Gave Me Back My Life

by Zabbers



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Atlantis, Blood, Claw Marks, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Forgiveness, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Multi, Polyamory, Post Episode: s05e20 Enemy at the Gate, Rescue, Sharing a Bed, Smut, Team as Family, Trust, Whump, Wraith Feeding, hunger/thirst/starvation, interspecies relations, returning Atlantis to Pegasus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:48:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29664765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: John had known hunger. He'd known thirst. He'd wandered, lost, the sun beating down, too stubborn to admit that he was lost, thinking he could save—people, the day, anything.If forced to explain himself, he’d say that he hadn’t seen it as a choice.When he fell through the Stargate, he was in need of rescue as much as he'd needed to do the rescuing.
Relationships: John Sheppard/Todd the Wraith, Ronon Dex/Teyla Emmagan/Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26
Collections: Stargate Winter Fic Exchange 2020-21





	John Sheppard Gave Me Back My Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aristossachaion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aristossachaion/gifts).



> Written for the [Stargate Winter Fic Exchange](/collections/stargate_winter_fic_exchange)
> 
> Many thanks to [wicked_socks](/users/wicked_socks) for betaing, handholding, problem-solving, providing the best solution in the whole fic, and putting up with all the flailing!

He came through the gate falling, as though someone had pushed him through. Rodney had seen John trip and catch himself plenty of times, going or more usually being forced to go too fast, but this time he stumbled and he didn’t stop until he crashed onto his hands and knees, head down like he’d never seen the gate room floor before, or maybe like he couldn't see it. 

“Get a medical team up here!” Rodney heard himself saying, hurrying down the stairs, assuming one of the people over his shoulder, who’d abruptly become nameless and all but faceless again, would do as he said.

“Dr. McKay, wait.” Lorne was trying to make him follow the protocol and let the Marines approach first—they’d agreed it was best to be cautious—but Rodney was already crouching on the floor with him, reaching for him. 

“John?”

He was thin, conspicuously thin, obvious even through the raggedness of his uniform shirt, which was too loose around the collar, and seemed to have grown a size larger at the hunched shoulders. Everything about him was ragged and squalid, the hair that had never quite been regulation coming over the tips of his ears and curling at the nape of his neck, his skin shiny with reddish grime, his clothes, while not exactly _rank_ , brackish, stiff, that same grime rubbed into its worn creases. His mission patches were missing, and even the epaulettes had ripped from his shoulders, Rodney noticed, and couldn't help fixating on. One of them hung by a thread, buttonless. 

“John?” Rodney tried again, because he wasn’t moving, not to get up or to curl up, and that was disturbing. It felt unnatural. It made him uncertain. 

At last, John raised his head. Peering through his over-long forelock at his eyes, Rodney couldn’t say for sure whether he was hurt or bewildered or relieved, only that he must have been bone-tired, wrung out, as though he had used up all the resources he had, and that he hadn’t picked himself up because in spite of everything he’d done, he'd made it back, he’d made it home, and it meant he didn’t have to. He shouldn't have to.

* * *

Someone lifted him up and put him on a gurney. He thought it was Ronon, taking his weight single-handedly with ease, and with the easy familiarity of a teammate. John slumped against the warmth, letting himself have just that much. Then, too soon, the reassuring touch was gone and he was staring up at the path of ceilings that led to the infirmary. 

That was familiar too.

* * *

He'd been fed on. His shirt was open, t-shirt ripped a long time ago, and Ronon could see the claw marks still raw on his chest under matted hair. He didn't look it, though, and he didn't look the way he had when that Wraith had given him his life back either. His lips were cracked and there was salt dried into crusty white residue in the folds of his skin. But those lines weren't new, and from what he could see on the surface there wasn't anything a round of IVs and a month of decent meals couldn't fix. 

Ronon stood around while Beckett fussed and Sheppard let him. He stood with his hands braced on the lip of the next bed over because he couldn’t really let go. Sheppard’s hands were steady as he unbuckled his belt and holster; maybe his fingers shook a little on his shirt buttons. Ronon wasn’t sure.

Beckett made a sound as Sheppard pulled the rag of his t-shirt over his head. 

Dr. Beckett had seen Sheppard through a lot. He’d seen all of them through a lot. He’d been there the first time, Sheppard putting off the infirmary until he couldn’t really put it off anymore—“I'm fine; you already checked me over in the jumper”—and Ronon got it, he wouldn’t have wanted to be examined either. What had happened was too strange, too much against the way of things, and it didn’t matter how warm the bedside manner was, how much he trusted the doctor. He would have felt like a specimen. Sheppard had shrugged it off, put up with the medical evaluation when Dr. Weir finally ordered him to go, got the hell out of there as soon as he could and went off by himself for a while. Sometimes when the only cost was to himself, Sheppard could play the good soldier. 

Ronon had left him alone, that time. It hadn’t been easy. Now he watched without moving, maybe without blinking. He watched Sheppard shift uncomfortably under the scrutiny in the clear light of the examination room. He saw him grit his teeth at Beckett’s careful touch. He stared at the ribs he’d never been able to see before and again at Sheppard’s chest.

* * *

John watched Ronon watching him. He followed the trajectory of Ronon’s stare, kind of dully, he was aware, because his senses weren’t a hundred percent ready to deal with the fact that he was back in Atlantis yet. It was obvious Ronon was assessing every new mark on his body as ably as Beckett—maybe more, his body giving away to Ronon things Beckett, as his doctor, wouldn’t try to know. 

There were the things Beckett couldn't know, either. Like how it felt to be trussed up and fed on, to not be able to do anything as the life turned acrid in you, how it took something away from you to have that life given back, too, to be made small and helpless and dependent again, and to know how easy it was to do that to you. 

He looked Ronon in the eye. He could say something, though he didn’t always with Ronon. If McKay had followed them to the infirmary, he would have tried. But McKay had stayed behind in the gate room, standing still in the middle of it until John couldn’t see him anymore. At the last minute, his hand had gone to his radio, his eyes still wide and his mouth a downturned line.

* * *

Teyla arrived in time to witness what she supposed from the expressions of carefully-schooled endurance on both John and Ronon’s faces was the last in a long series of blood draws. The familiar little tubes with their colorful caps lined the top of the cart by John’s side, darkly full. 

It was a great relief to see John, although after receiving Rodney’s radio call, she had found herself pausing, hesitating before hurrying to the infirmary. Even now she lingered in the doorway, gathering herself. But he caught sight of her over Carson’s shoulder and he smiled. 

So she, too, smiled and went to him and Ronon. 

“It’s John. He just came through the gate.” Rodney had sounded distressed, his voice high and his syllables short. “Teyla, it’s John.”

She had made him give her details, as much for him to talk as for her to have the information. Still, it steadied them both. She’d stopped by John’s quarters on the way, breathed in the stale, spare reminders of him, half Earth and half Pegasus—the synthetically-perfumed products and the oil and processed minerals of military equipment, but also Athosian candle wax, Ronon’s muscle balm, Rodney’s sunscreen, whose scent John had called “beach babe”. 

Teyla brought him the folded clothes she’d picked up for him. He was sucking on pieces of ice from a cup. There was a tray from the mess hall with a bottle of Gatorade on it and some sort of porridge, thin cream of rice, sitting untouched. His other arm was occupied with Carson’s drip, taped to his inner elbow, and when Carson moved off, Teyla could see that his chest had been cleaned, even stitched. 

“Thanks,” John said around his ice. Or so she understood his meaning; the sound he produced was more croak or growl than speech. She patted his hand. He moved his thumb over hers, capturing it. Ronon was an entire bed away, the space between them palpable. Rodney wasn’t there at all.

* * *

Beckett released him to his quarters, finally, after a lot of fretting and tests and kindly, shiny-eyed tending. He needed a shower, he was sure of that, even if it took Teyla’s support to get him there. Ronon followed behind them like a watchdog, and John couldn't say if he was being guarded or escorted. The doors to his quarters and his bathroom opened sluggishly; the water in the shower faltered and sputtered before it resolved into a utilitarian flow. Even the city didn’t seem clear how to feel about him, and that was a hurt that pierced through the haze.

He leaned against the wall under the spray, determined not to sink to the floor and get caught looking like he was having a breakdown or like he needed any more help. He’d had more than enough of that already. He could hear Teyla and Ronon talking quietly over the sound of the water. 

He watched the runoff of oxidized dirt drain away at his feet, opened his mouth to wash out the taste of rust and salt and his own stale spit with the taste of sweet water. 

He'd washed in the ocean. He'd found a spot eventually where the shore was more beach than cliff, where the breakers sometimes wouldn't actually break him. The salt water that stung his skin buoyed him and took his weight, and he floated in between slow, spaced sets, daring them to pick up the height to dash him against the sharp rocks and hold him down. When he ducked below the surface he had the illusion of freedom from the oppressive gravity for as long as he could hold his breath. He opened his eyes and dove for the bottom and the massive dark mounds of the glassy rock, sloping away into the darkness. 

But the ocean was huge and silent and the weird emptiness drove him out of it long before the waves did.

* * *

Rodney was in the expedition leader’s office with Lorne—they were both only pretending to be doing something besides waiting, though there was certainly plenty to do, with the city still in shambles and the staff pitifully short—when Carson came up to deliver his report on his patient. 

“I gave him fluids and antibiotics, but this is much like before. Colonel Sheppard’s vitals are fine; he’s better than he has any right to be—”

Rodney frowned. Carson glanced at him. 

“—than we can expect him to be, given the clear signs of recent, and I’d say repeated, feedings.”

“What about the enzyme?” Lorne asked.

“There is Wraith enzyme in his system, though not nearly as much as we’ve seen in other cases in the past. Not enough that I would worry about withdrawal. And there’s no sign of the cellular decay associated with feeding.”

“Then how do you know that he’s been fed on?”

“He has an open feeding wound that hasn’t healed. If I had to guess, I’d say it hasn’t been healing for quite some time.”

Lorne paused, but when Rodney didn’t contribute, he continued his questions. “That’s different from before, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and it’s the reason I think this is a repeated event.”

They were all silent as they let that sink in. Rodney remembered John in that spare office at the SGC, the bare emotion exposed for once as Rodney asked John to let him sacrifice himself to Todd to save his sister and John refused. He remembered the way the John on Kolya's grainy transmission didn’t scream—at least, not loud enough to be heard over the Wraith’s wild roar—but had thrown his head back, every time the feeding hand landed on his chest. 

“What does Colonel Sheppard say about it?”

“He’s dehydrated and he’s exhausted, and I don’t know when he last ate anything. He didn’t say very much, and I didn't like to push. I discharged him to go clean himself up. Teyla and Ronon are with him. I think he’ll feel more ready to make a report when he’s had a chance to pull himself together.”

“He’s not actually answerable to anybody here,” Rodney said at last.

“I’m sure the Colonel will want to let us know what happened,” Lorne said, his tone conciliatory if somewhat careful.

“Why, because he was so eager to tell us what he was doing _before_ he went AWOL?”

Lorne looked pained.

* * *

As soon as they were through the gate they were falling. It was the gravity differential, taking John by surprise, like walking across a flush surface into a rising elevator. The unexpected step had buckled his knee; the sudden extra weight of the arm slung over his shoulder made it worse, unbalancing him and dragging him down. They’d fallen forward and sideways, toppling into the fist-sized rocks strewn all over. The wormhole collapsed, taking light with it.

John had paused long enough to check that there was air he could breathe, but it was all he'd had time to do. After he dialed, he’d still had to get Todd down the stairs and across the gate room floor and over the event horizon before somebody stopped them.

They were through though, John staring steadily into the dark and waiting for his eyes to adjust. He wished he had a pair of night-vision goggles on him. He wished he had basically any equipment: all he'd dared to sneak into his pockets were extra Powerbars and some spare ammo. He had his sidearm, his knife, some cordage braided under his wristband, a multi-tool in his sock... He hoped Todd knew what he was doing. 

There was supposed to be a facility here. A friendly facility, if friendly meant less likely to try to suck the life out of him, and then only because of Todd’s say-so. John couldn’t imagine this place friendly. The rock he’d landed on had cut him and left a big tear in his pants leg. The crash of waves and the hiss of blowholes never let up, all that first night of hobbling across terrain he couldn’t make out. By dawn, he could see that there was nothing around to support him; no sign of any animals; not a speck of green to hint at plant life. The whole place was just a black, bare rock. 

It wasn't like the Ancients to put a planetary gate somewhere so hostile, somewhere so far from the Earth-normal, boreal average they favored. 

“Tell me again why the Wraith built a base on this planet?”

“I did not tell you in the first place.”

John scowled. “So tell me now.”

Todd only showed his teeth. 

He’d been letting Todd lead, arm in arm and ignoring the claws so close to his head and the hand-mouth making sounds he didn’t really want to think about right up by his ear. Except Todd wasn’t exactly helping a lot, which was understandable, because the guy had been starving for a while, but disappointing because this was a rescue mission for him. 

He seemed to know where he was going this time. But he hadn’t given John any indication that the planet was going to be so damned unpleasant, which was smart of him, because John wouldn’t have agreed to the plan if he’d known.

* * *

Ronon had asked him, more than once, when he planned to kill the Wraith. 

It was pointless to keep him alive and not feed him, and they weren’t going to feed him. Ever since they'd met him, letting him go all the time and seeing him come back, sleek on somebody else’s life, had been one of those frustrations Ronon hated but bit down on, more or less because he had to. The tactical advantage was questionable. But holding a Wraith on Atlantis while Atlantis was stuck was a lot worse than questionable. 

McKay insisted they wouldn’t be able to keep the city on Earth for long. “They’re not going to risk disclosure, and there’s nowhere to hide a structure the size of Atlantis. Even if we drain the ZPMs maintaining the cloak—which would be stupid, even for the IOA—they’ll run out, sooner rather than later. At most, we could put the city in orbit around another planet in the solar system, but unshielded and all but unmanned? It would be extremely vulnerable to anyone in this galaxy who wanted to get their hands on all that Ancient technology, and anyway, I’m not about to put the idea into anybody’s head.”

McKay underestimated the IOA’s ability to draw out a decision; maybe Woolsey getting better since becoming expedition leader had made him forget, or maybe he hadn’t been thinking about how urgent the need was going to be. But Ronon knew the Marines who rotated through guard detail, and they talked. And he had nothing else to do on Earth, so he was the one who was around when Sheppard started worrying about it. 

“I wonder if it’s that drug.”

“If what’s what drug?”

“Todd. Seems like he’s deteriorating faster than before. Now, I’m no expert, but I’m wondering if the botched gene therapy made him weaker.”

“Good. And you’re right.”

“Right about what?”

“You’re not an expert. So leave it to the experts.”

“Well, I kind of need to know.”

“Why?”

For a moment, Sheppard looked like he was stumped, or confused. “Todd’s my responsibility.”

“Since when?”

* * *

He’d been so willing to step through the Stargate, so quick to do as he was told. He couldn't help thinking that maybe if he'd been in the chair instead of Beckett, Atlantis would still be in orbit. 

Sure, of course, it was great to save the Earth, and now John could say that he had. 

It didn’t feel as good as it should. He expected to be relieved and elated, but the sight of San Francisco Bay from the railing of that balcony didn't fill him with relief or a sense of homecoming. He'd looked down at the gray water a long way past his feet instead and watched it wash over the lowest structures at the bottom of the city, where he could just see some of the damage from the battle and the difficult landing.

He hadn't known until he’d had to ask Carter to pass on his last message how much more alone he felt on a planet with billions of his own people on it. He’d had plenty of time to stew in that realization while waiting for the super hive to show up. 

He wanted to get the city back into space, back to Pegasus, now that the crisis was over. He wanted to be back there too. He surprised himself with how much he wanted this. He swung by the chair room again and again, remembering the other thing that had happened in low orbit in the F-302, sometime after the adrenaline started wearing off. He’d been hit by the sudden awareness that the weapons chair was gone, which was strange because most of his life it had been there, and so had he, and he’d never felt its presence the way he felt its absence when the darts blew it up. 

There was no one in the chair room—all the repairs were happening elsewhere, and almost everyone who wasn’t required for repairs was on leave or temporary assignment or had found a conference to attend. John felt ridiculous standing around in the half-lit room, just looking at the chair. But he knew if he sat down, he'd be doing something there'd be no going back from. 

In Antarctica, it had been like this, the chair like a mote of light catching at the edges of his attention, until in the moment right before he thought it to life, he had _had_ to look, had to touch, had to sit down.

* * *

When the sound of the water stopped and John did not emerge, Teyla made the waiting easier by preparing tea. Ronon had begun to pace, and her own impatience wanted out just as badly, and was hardly any more in check than his. 

It was Ronon who asked, “where’s McKay?” and Teyla forbore to suggest that _perhaps he does not want…_ because Ronon was right, and it would be better if Rodney were here too. 

And when Teyla called him on the radio, he only sighed and said, “yes, I’ll be right there,” even before Teyla had spoken, so he knew it too. 

John still had not appeared when Rodney did.

“What is he doing in there?” Rodney asked. “How do we know he hasn't passed out and fallen down?”

He waved his arms around, leaning forward. “‘Help! I'm a Colonel, and I can't get up!’” he said in the small, higher-pitched voice of mocking quotation. 

The door opened silently behind Rodney, and Colonel Sheppard leaned there against the frame, watching him. 

“Hey, Rodney. Good to see you,” he rasped after a long moment.

Teyla caught the exposed look on Rodney’s face, his eyes wide with distress, in the moment before he whipped around. He crossed his arms. She wondered if he had replaced the raw emotion with his defensive or his derisive expression. It was not easy to tell from the tilt of his head. 

For his part, John held his ground, body slouched somewhere between determined ease and weariness, towel-wrapped hip pressing into the jamb. He had been very weak, walking down the corridor to his quarters and pretending to be more capable of it than he was. He looked away from Rodney, in that way he had of seeking escape by averting his eyes. 

“Is that it? ‘Good to see you’? If anything, that's worse than ‘so long, Rodney,’ and I honestly didn’t think you were ever going to top that.” Rodney shifted his weight. Now Teyla knew he must look unhappy, disapproving. “Well? Are you going to tell us what the hell happened, or are we supposed to be so thankful you've come back to us in one extremely battered, only _almost_ broken piece that we don't try to question you?”

John having nothing to say, angry or otherwise, no scowl or retort, told Teyla as much as did the startled jerk of his head and the hurried shuttering of his own expression. He opened his mouth, and then he closed it again. 

Each of them had fisted a hand by his side, Rodney’s a nervous clutch, John’s like he was holding himself in his cupped palm; they had never come to blows though they raised their voices and their passions often enough, and Teyla could not imagine it happening now, in spite of John’s strange tension. Ronon was watching them as closely as Teyla, and as had happened often before, she was glad to have him by her side in a difficult situation, a counterweight to keep her balanced.

* * *

Maybe he did like that live grenade feeling more than he cared to admit and couldn’t see it; Todd never exactly lied but his truths had a tendency to fuck John over, sneakily and dramatically. There _was_ a facility, but it was a wreck. John recognized the pattern of damage from Wraith battles of his own: warheads from a hive in orbit, strafing fire from darts, a gaping explosion where a kamikaze had struck. 

“Doesn’t look like the lights are on,” John said. “I don’t think there’s anyone home.”

He drew his pistol just in case. 

Todd snarled. 

Inside, it looked like the building had tried to repair itself. Sinews of material looped and bundled and ended abruptly. The corridors were dry and covered in red grit underfoot that John thought was pulverized rock. It thinned out in the interior into plain dust and cobwebs. 

Todd pushed away from John to sink his hands into the wall instead, clinging and listing as he clawed his way ahead. If he had expected to find safe harbor and the reassurance of familiarity, the beat-up, overgrown state of the place had to be a bitter pill to take.

John had gone home on leave once to a buddy’s house that’d had no one to take care of it while he was on deployment. Kudzu had entered the property and spread all over the place. Thick fingers of it reached up the siding of the house. It marooned the car he said he’d been meaning to fix up, leafy vines threading like ropes through the windows he’d left rolled down. John had cut as much of it as he could, tugging it from the house, trying to get it out of the soil. 

He’d just spent six months in the desert. It had almost seemed a shame, to chop up so much greenery and stuff it in a paper bag by the curb, even if it did look creepy swallowing the yard. It was just going to grow back; there wasn’t anything like time to do enough. 

Car was rusted out anyway. 

And no one was ever going to be coming to fix it up.

For all John knew, that car was still there, drowned in a sea of green. Or maybe someone had bought the house. Maybe they'd done a better job with the kudzu. Maybe the car had been hauled away and junked. 

John had stopped leaving much of anything behind a long time ago for someone stateside to deal with the day he didn’t make it back.

This place reminded him of that one. 

There was a holding area. It was empty, the stasis chambers dark holes he didn't need to look in. The webbing that sealed those he could see was all slit open or torn up. 

This was too familiar, the cobwebs, the used-up feeding cells, the lifeless structure like a tangle of dried-out lianas. There was a ship just like this filling with sand on a planet on the edges of the Lantean system, where it had crashed ten thousand years ago, and where John had landed with three living scientists and taken off with only one. His responsibility. They’d recovered their dead but left the old bones, human and Wraith alike, to their slow attrition. 

Deep in the shadows, Todd made a sound that was more animal growl than cogent frustration.

* * *

John owed his team an explanation, but he didn’t know if he could give them one. There was a moment—he was wandering, there was no better way to describe it, pretty much aimlessly around the city, his boots loud in the empty corridors—even the control room only had a skeleton crew, the Stargate powered down in deference to SGC gate operations—he’d been to see Todd, who seemed to be more surprised and more amused every day at the fact that he was still alive, but who also seemed a little less alive every day—when suddenly it was clear what he had to do. 

He was already headed in the right direction, and so he kept going until he was in the chair room again, letting the lights stay dimmed. The chair had its own pulse and glow, hard to notice in a bright room, but in the dark it was like a TV flickering slowly through the late-night shows and low-budget commercials, sound turned low and the changing picture filling the empty hours. 

When he sat, the chair thrummed, like the city had been waiting for him. 

He was pretty sure he could fly her into orbit without getting shot down. Once he was far enough above the surface, he could open a hyperspace window. Then, Pegasus. Home. 

He closed his eyes and became the city. There was no one to go through the pre-flight with him, no one to monitor the power exchange as he fired up his engines and activated his inertial dampeners. The weakened ZPMs were out of balance; John shunted their output around until the discomfort let up. Then he opened his senses and let the world in.

The ocean was cold, brinier than he thought it ought to be, busy with broken chop. He thought automatically about crosswinds, about air traffic, though there was nothing but open sky in the no-fly zone above Atlantis. He felt the strength building quickly, didn’t delay now that he’d decided, gathered it up under him to propel him into the air, leapt, dragging lines of water streaming back in all directions into the ocean below. 

The sense that it was the right thing to do, that remaining on Earth was wrong, was overwhelming. The relief was like physical relief, the pleasure of the release of pressure, of having resolved and acted and begun. The city was flying, and then the air thinned, and the shield enclosed its bubble of atmosphere, and the city was in orbit, and then John broke orbit, and then they were away, weightless, all light, a bauble of enormous power freed of the umbilical that had tried to hold it to its birthplace. 

Atlantis might have come from Earth but they had never been built to stay here. 

Alarms were going off all over the place. Confusion and then questions and then orders flooded his ear from his radio headset, but John barely understood them. He thought he heard a banging—someone at the sealed door to the chair room—distant and irrelevant, some other John Sheppard’s problem. He looked into deep space, alive with stars, and he reached through the darkness, and he opened up a window, and he didn't hesitate to climb through.

* * *

It was John’s determination to keep them together that had started it. 

Rodney had noted peripherally the alarm growing sharper and sharper in Sheppard as other loosely-associated groups came apart, sorted by some inscrutable alien parameters into what felt very much like two teams. But he was busy swallowing down the insecurity of grade school gym class humiliations—he was going to be all alone on that choosing line, trying to reconcile the fact that while he didn’t even want to run around trying to dodge balls or capture the flag, he also didn’t want his unpopularity demonstrated so vividly week after week and year after year—when Sheppard shifted, drawing Rodney’s attention; except he was turning to Teyla.

“Kiss me,” he said under his voice. 

Teyla’s eyes were not quite as wide as Rodney’s felt, but only because Rodney didn’t think anyone’s eyes could be as wide as his felt right now. 

It wasn’t exactly like it was an order, but John wasn’t doing one of his smiles that softened him all around the eyes either, and this was hardly the time or the place and what the fuck, what?

“Trust me,” John added evenly. A shock went through Rodney’s spine as he opened his look out to include him and Ronon in it. “Go along with me for this one.” 

Teyla started twisting her head and shoulders, skeptical, but then she stopped and squared herself and tilted her face up, almost as though she were going to touch foreheads with him. Sheppard lifted one hand to Teyla’s face and rested the pad of his thumb more lightly than Rodney had ever seen on the line of her jaw, and they kissed. Rodney couldn’t help noticing how gentle Sheppard’s lips looked as they pulled away. 

Then Sheppard looked up and Ronon was there, leaning down to peck both of them on the mouth in turn, as if they’d been kissing for years. 

Rodney spluttered. 

“Look, the only people they aren’t splitting up are the visibly affectionate ones,” John said in a rush as he moved his body directly in front of Rodney’s. 

He was filling Rodney’s field of vision, contrary to what he was telling him to do, though, yes, somewhere in some part of his awareness, he did know that it was true: there were couples and trios and quads still together, looking kind of...loving, which was simultaneously horrific and reassurance that his entire team hadn’t just lost its collective mind, though oh my god, what if this was some kind of sex pollen thing, or what if they were messing with him? But they wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t do that!

“Rodney,” Sheppard was saying. “ _McKay_.”

He moved in, decisive or impatient, or just trying to get it over with, brushing against Rodney’s not at all ready mouth, and for the moment that Rodney thought this was going to be it, he confronted a feeling of disappointment, and for some screwed-up reason, that feeling relaxed him, made him respond.

Sheppard’s lips opened. Not a _lot_ , but suddenly it was a real kiss, longer than Rodney had expected and over before he was ready to let it go. And when it did end, Rodney thought he saw that softness he’d been wondering about, right before Sheppard’s face went all uncomfortable. 

“Sheppard,” Ronon said in a warning voice—the discomfort was replaced immediately with alertness; all around them, people were getting dragged away, and the next sweep of the crowd brought scrutiny down on their group. But then it passed over them and left them intact. When the thing, the _battle-orgy_ started, the team from Atlantis was allowed to stand aside. 

So John’s desperate plan had worked.

* * *

Urgency vied with necessity. Pegasus was ahead of them, but the distance between galaxies was lifeless and long, and even extended into the tireless arms of the city, John was human. Fatigue got to him. His body needed relief; his mind needed rest. He struggled to keep the city in hyperdrive. He struggled not to fall out of the zone and his connection with the control chair. 

It was quiet in the chair room now. All the way to the edge of the galaxy, he’d fended off Lorne’s efforts at the door and McKay’s attacks via computer. When they gave up, he felt the pang of loss. 

Atlantis tried to fill in that loss. Atlantis tried to see to all his needs. She upped the oxygen in the room, and he thought maybe there was a stimulant in the mix too, and who knew what other aerosolized Ancient drugs. She’d never done that before, in flight or in drone operations. Maybe it was a power thing. It did feel different, having a full complement of ZPMs, even if they were nearing drained. Or maybe it was that he’d never stayed in the chair so long, hour after hour alone, carrying them across the void like he was carrying a mouthful of water in the palm of his hand.

She knew he couldn’t keep it up for long, and finally she presented him with an option, a half-seen, half-remembered instrument in his peripheral vision: a way to get home faster. The wormhole drive. She’d done it before, with Beckett and Zelenka, so she knew how, even if he hadn’t been with her. They could do the calculations together. She popped up the possibility again and again, with a gauge to show him that he could and a warning that he should do it soon. 

But he pushed back. He thought, _Wait. We can wait. Hold on. Just a little longer. A little closer before we jump._ He wanted to save what power he could so they’d have a reserve. He could wear himself out that much more, push it right up to the limit, if it meant they’d have a better chance on the other end.

* * *

“Not only did you hijack Atlantis, you blew out all three ZPMs!” McKay shouted. His face had started to turn red. Sheppard was doing that thing he did of staring ahead at nothing in particular, his spine relatively straight, for him. 

But suddenly he broke out of it to make angry eye contact with McKay. Even though Sheppard’s voice was still a wreck, it didn't stop him arguing back. “Two of which Todd gave us to save the Earth. The least we could do was return the favor and save him too.”

“He’s Wraith,” Ronon pointed out. 

“Not to mention,” McKay barreled on, “he stole those ZPMs from the Replicators in the first place, and if he hadn’t stolen them, Earth wouldn’t have been under threat from the super hive! The super hive that he developed and built.”

“I couldn't just let him starve. Again.” 

McKay had insisted once when getting made fun of for being Canadian that Sheppard had an accent under duress, and Ronon thought maybe he could hear it now. 

“He feeds on human beings!” 

“He didn't.” 

“What are you talking about?”

“On the planet we went to, he didn't feed on humans. There weren't any humans. Not alive, anyway.”

Ronon felt the grimace lift his lip. 

“Did he not feed on you?” Teyla asked. 

Sheppard shook his head. He’d gone quiet. 

Ronon exchanged a look with Teyla. They could _see_. 

“John,” he said. “Your chest.”

John'd had his arms crossed since they started talking about Todd. Now he only crossed them tighter.

* * *

There was no DHD. There was no food, for human or for Wraith. At each discovery, Todd had snarled and stared in enough rage that John believed it was for real. 

The DHD had been blasted into rubble—once he saw the rest of the damage from the attack, John understood that the enemy hive had blown it up deliberately to block escape, a more permanent version of dialing in from another gate. He wasn't surprised later to learn that the communications arrays had been destroyed too. 

In a smaller type of chamber that John had never seen before, they found food stores, actual food, all inedible, all spoiled. Todd had looked to him with the question clear on his face, and John had had to shake his head. 

Some rescue this was turning out to be. They were stranded, and they were both going to starve. John watched Todd’s hand clench and spasm, the feeding slit lurid though he clutched it close by his side, and tried not to dwell on the uncomfortable thought that in this scenario, he was the spare Powerbar Todd had stashed in his pocket. 

He tried not to think about Atlantis either, stranded and then abandoned. For once, he did feel cut off, the way some of the others must have felt when the Stargate closed behind them the very first time the Expedition had stepped through it into another galaxy.

* * *

It was not just the handprint on John’s chest. It was not just the feeding mark, reddened central wound and five sharp gouges, like a constellation incised into flesh, which although not outlined in the shape of fingers and palm, was so unmistakably the work of a massive hand, proportioned too much like a human’s. That alone was bad enough, a pattern Teyla associated with grief and horror, painfully familiar.

There were trails of scratches on John’s skin. She had seen them across his back in parallel lines. They varied over his body, most nail-thin, but some too deep, too long, somehow wild and out of control. Now that he was clean, the extent of these minor injuries had become apparent. 

They were too extensive for Teyla’s liking.

She was sure that Ronon felt the same, although she had only begun to understand her own reaction, tender protectiveness but confused by some combination of pity and distrust and distaste she could not have associated with John even when he had merely been Major or Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard. 

And though his actions had not stranded _her_ far away from her own people, they troubled her. It was not like him to act without Teyla and Rodney and Ronon. They were his team. 

And Todd, as Ronon said, was Wraith. 

“He didn’t feed on me,” John said stubbornly. 

“Then what did he do?” Ronon asked.

* * *

Feeding burned. Or it stung, the way a jellyfish stung, or it grabbed you just as you would expect something done through a hand would, and squeezed and crushed and scraped you out from the core. It went looking in every part of you and pulped raw whatever it found so that it could be drained from you—the interface for that the pulsing wound where the hand gripped you, by what might as well have been the heart, the throat. 

Feeding got in your head. It was different from the way a Queen got in your head, without ever touching you. It was the opposite of that; it was all touch. It was a hand inside of you. John didn’t think even Wraith should want to get that intimate with their food, but maybe that’s what it took to taste defiance. 

Then again, Todd hadn’t exactly been at the top of his game. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be like that. Weren't a lot of people who lived to say what it was supposed to be like. The guys John knew—Ford, who talked like the enzyme was the best damned thing but just the same was terrified of the way it made him feel; Ronon, who wouldn't talk about it at all except when he'd been raving, going through detox while they took turns keeping watch—weren't typical cases either. It was all about the enzyme for them. 

Three years ago when Todd had thrust his hand at John to feed he had gotten under John’s skin. Unsurprising: Kolya was there already, and it was Kolya who had made Todd happen. _Hunger burns_ , Todd had said. _He is torturing both of us_. On that, John thought, and on their prison break, they had formed the strange relationship that brought them together again and again, Todd at John’s mercy, voluntarily returned to chains; John risking everything he cared about even though he was sure there were a thousand things Todd kept to himself that John needed to know. A lot of times he had wondered if it was the right thing to work with him again, to let him so close. Bottom line was that he wasn’t dead of it yet and some people were alive who would probably not be otherwise. 

But when Todd had seized John by that savage hand, he hadn’t really let go. John had never acknowledged this connection between them because he needed to be able to trust in his own judgment. In retrospect, maybe he shouldn’t have. 

Being fed on hurt, but getting your life back hurt too. You had to learn to want it, in the few seconds that the process took. You had to come to terms with it, how it became pain you wanted. You had to learn to accept where it came from. For John, that was Todd. 

There was no food but there was a small bay of faltering stasis pods. They were full of Wraith. 

John watched Todd hesitate over the controls. He wasn’t even really on his feet anymore, propped up, sagging, against the console. John wasn’t going to get too close, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to try to stick his shoulder under Todd’s again. There were four options here, and starving after coming all this way wasn’t a real one. So there were three options. Todd was the one who had to choose between two of them, and the longer the hesitation, the closer John’s hand inched to his sidearm again for the third. 

But shoot him, and then what? Wait for rescue? Atlantis wasn’t coming, or they’d have shown up already. 

“Well, this is awkward,” he said when he saw that Todd had noticed.

John had known hunger. He’d known thirst. He’d wandered, lost, like a dumbass, the sun beating down, time running out, too stubborn to admit that he was lost, that he’d made a bad call, that he couldn’t achieve what his entire chain of command had deemed too risky to be tried, thinking he could _save_ —people, the day, anything. He’d done it more than once. If forced to explain himself, to someone he cared to answer candidly, he’d say that he hadn’t seen it as a choice. 

This planet was all water, and it didn’t make any damned difference. It was just another desert.

* * *

“Why did you rescue me, John Sheppard?”

The Wraith had fed. In the end, for all his hesitation, it had not been much of a choice. Survive, of course. Honor the strange pact. And anyway, Sheppard had a gun. 

“Do you believe that you acted out of compulsion? What will you tell your teammates?”

He was not an expert on human needs, but he knew they ate and drank frequently—incessantly—and that Sheppard had not in some time. There was nothing on this planet for a human. 

If he had meant it when he spared Sheppard, then he must keep Sheppard alive. Otherwise, the sacrifice of his own kind would have been needless, and wicked besides. 

Trust, and the galactic stage on which that game played out, the stage of hives and city-ships and battlegrounds, were complications between them. When they were alone it came down to simple things: survival, sustenance, but also something more fundamental. He saw himself in Sheppard. 

He did not want Sheppard to end. 

He had been watching Sheppard come out of the ocean and drag himself up the rocky beach. He’d given him time to make his slow way back to the refuge under his own power, where he dropped to the floor, wearied easily by the gravity on this world in his weakened state. He stood over the slumped form, examining him intently. 

Sheppard licked dry lips. Under normal circumstances, they were plush, the quintessence of human softness. It had been a startling thing, to restore Sheppard and discover that mouth, to wish that he had been able to see it while he fed. Later, to see it smirk and scowl and to see Sheppard press his lips together or let them slightly part and to realize that human mouths were so expressive.

Sheppard struggled to his feet. He pulled himself to his full height, and human and Wraith met one another’s eyes. The Wraith it was who moved, reaching out, marveling at the way this human didn’t flinch.

He rested the pads of his fingers against collarbones. Sheppard wore a long chain around his neck, hung with metal plates that brushed the palm where it hovered over skin. 

“I had to,” Sheppard answered, and it was a long moment before the question that had been asked came back to mind. 

“You have given me back my life again. But that is not the only reason I preserve yours.” 

The life bond between them was another complication. It muddled motivations, tangled with everything else in their natures. One or two lives shared between Wraith was not so very much, but Sheppard was human. Moreover, that first life shared had been Sheppard's own. 

He inclined his head; Sheppard tilted his chin up, a gesture of—well...defiance. 

“I told you that this was a gift for brothers.” 

He pressed his hand flat to Sheppard’s chest. The heart, the life pounded at his touch, and his pulse matched itself to it. The skin was feverish hot and seemed almost thin as it broke, but the contact between them was cool, fresh water. He willed the flow into Sheppard, balancing it between them. 

“Brotherhood means a great deal to a Wraith.”

* * *

It _was_ desperation, Rodney realized later, as much as determination. John took the outside spot on the bed they were given, balanced on the narrow edge with all three of them crowded between him and the itchy daub wall, assiduously giving them as much room as he could. It was all too apt, because he was palpably on edge.

He realized it again when the Wraith took Ronon for hunting on Sateda, when Jeannie almost died, when Michael had Teyla, and John refused to sit out her rescue. That was desperation, and fear that he could lose any one of them, that he might be helpless to do anything about it when it happened. It was John’s _I can’t_ , almost not a full sentence at all, more a feeling than a thought, and a feeling he apparently couldn't bring himself to talk about. 

Rodney lay in the dark of the hut staring at John. He wondered if he should touch him, but he wasn’t sure. John carried his personal space with him, somehow even when they were all crowded together in a bed, when they were all huddled together for warmth, when he had saved them all by pretending that that space didn’t exist. 

“Go to sleep, Rodney,” John said. 

“You kissed me,” Rodney said, stupidly.

“I kissed all of you. It was an emergency.”

“Is this going to be a thing now?”

“I would not mind,” Teyla put in. 

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I wouldn’t mind either,” Ronon said. 

“I thought you were both asleep!”

“We’re kind of squashed back here.”

John’s exasperated eyeroll expressed itself through his entire upper body. “You wanna swap?”

Ronon climbed over them, a giant shadow, and thankfully no heavier than a shadow either.

Teyla reached for Rodney, and before he had thought about it he was letting her shuffle him over toward the wall, her arm going around his waist. John was surprisingly obedient—Rodney would almost say pliant—about following them and making room for Ronon on the end as he fitted himself around them.

But John relaxed considerably, and it turned out to be a surprisingly good way to fall asleep, when they finally did settle down.

* * *

It was Ronon who picked up his teammates when they fell, Ronon who carried them when they needed to be carried. He hauled John up against the wall of his quarters, pushing close into his space.

“Ronon!” 

Teyla’s voice was a chiding, but she didn’t move to oppose him.

“Next time, you tell us what you’re planning, and you let us help you,” Ronon said. “You trust us the way you expect us to trust you. Because we still do.”

And they would, in spite of whatever happened. That's how it worked. John needed to see that.

John swallowed. It looked like it might hurt. “I couldn’t get you involved in this one. You or Teyla. And Rodney...look, I didn’t mean to cut Atlantis off.”

“Did you _mean to_ come back?” Rodney asked, still fighting, unhappy. 

“I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome.”

“We worried about you,” Teyla said.

“That’s not the same thing.”

Now Teyla rolled her eyes. “You are our family, John. That means a great deal, and you should not doubt the bond between us. We do not take it any more lightly than you do, no matter how you insist we must pursue our own lives outside of it.”

John looked steadily at Ronon, steeled for Ronon’s rejection. It was like he was daring him to it, to admit that he couldn’t reconcile John’s attitude toward the Wraith with his own, to just get on with breaking up the team already. Ronon could see how someone could let that expectation get to them. But it wasn't John's attitude toward the Wraith, it was John’s attitude toward the team that Ronon was concerned about right now. 

Finally, he let out his breath. “I can’t pretend to be happy about this thing you have going. But I'd be a lot less happy if you thought it meant you didn't belong with us anymore. You made the team. You made us.”

“You’re stuck with us, too,” Rodney said softly. 

John Sheppard had given Ronon his life back when he brought him to Atlantis and insisted he had a place here. He'd done it more than once. He had made it possible to do more than just survive. And he'd done a lot for the surviving part too. Ronon was sure Teyla felt the same, and that in their Earth way, he and Rodney had done something like that for each other. 

Like Teyla said, it meant a great deal.

* * *

John’s bed was small even for him alone, much less for the four of them together. They made do. 

They sat John on the bed, Rodney like a pillow propped behind him, Teyla by his side, Ronon crouched between his drawn-up knees. John smelled of his soap and shampoo and of the salt that hadn’t completely washed away. Perhaps it was some lingering scent of Todd, too, that had so unnerved her, but Todd had preserved his life and returned him to them, more _and_ less intact than Rodney had accused. She could only accept that Todd was a part of John’s life, and come to terms later with whether she was willing for him to be part of hers, even so distantly. 

The three of them would hold the team together, when John didn’t think he could. They would hold John together because they were the ones who could.

Teyla was careful with John’s bruises and broken skin, with the wound so raw on his chest, but otherwise, she refrained from too much of the gentility he would not thank her for. Rodney wrapped his arms and legs around him, fingers unhesitating now over John’s hollow ribs and stomach. Ronon leaned forward to kiss him, his eyes on John’s face. When he drew back, the twinkle was back in them, that fond amusement Teyla was accustomed to seeing beneath Ronon’s tough exterior in not-really-disguised smiles. 

Teyla rested her head on John’s shoulder, fitting her cheek to the curve, her forehead against his neck, feeling the tension leave him at last, with the warmth of their bodies against his side and back and legs. He let down the last of his guard, the wariness visibly easing away. 

She stroked his thigh, and he shivered, drawing in a breath. His eyes went very open. She smiled too, feeling suddenly fierce.

She climbed over him, straddling his thighs, her skirt slipping easily aside. Rodney’s hands wandered toward John’s erection, and he pushed with his shoulders into Rodney’s chest, arching his lower back so the towel fell away, his hips all but lifting to reach Rodney’s hands, to reach Teyla, to reach Ronon, who pressed down on John’s calves and pinned them beneath his own. 

Teyla bent down to meet him. His mouth was eager, but she would not linger as long as he wanted—she could taste iron under mint, feel the fragility of John’s almost-swollen lips. Instead, she moved to Rodney’s mouth; John dropped his head back, watching them. 

Ronon ranged over Teyla’s torso from behind, sweeping smooth lines up her sides, his hands strong, to rest on her chest. Teyla straightened into his touch, lengthening her spine luxuriously, stretching above her teammates. She looked down at John and raised an eyebrow at him. Taking the cue, he stretched up to loosen the fastenings on her singlet, and she pulled it in one motion over her head. 

Rodney had taken hold of John. It was always fascinating to watch Rodney’s hands, clever and sure once at work on any one of them, but this time, Teyla did not watch for long. She moved Ronon’s hands to her waist and positioned herself above John. John’s mouth was already open, and as Ronon lifted her and Rodney guided him into her, he made a sound like an artless groan, trusting and vulnerable, and they all gathered toward one another, all four of them together as they should be.

* * *

The last stasis pod had been emptied. Its occupant lay drained in her designer gown, John’s knife under her ribs. His thighs ached, he could feel the bruises developing on both his knees, and he had probably wrenched something that was going to be hell to heal fighting the Queen’s control and the planet’s gravity, but he’d managed to drive the knife up with enough force to stick. 

Todd had left it too long, gotten weak again, trying to finish his improvised DHD without this last feed. 

The build had been slow going, and even rationed, the energy Todd got from the moribund drone Wraith hadn’t really been enough. With Todd’s hand on his chest, the other a clawed, spasming grip, this time on his shoulder, that time on his arm or hip, John had been able to feel Todd’s hunger, even as he’d sharpened it to keep John alive. There’d been less and less to go around. 

In the end, Todd had almost collapsed again, working restlessly. But then had come the moment he’d straightened and lifted his head. He'd reached for the pod controls. 

“I have finished my work...but we both know we will not make it back to the Stargate unless I feed.”

She’d almost killed Todd. The Queen had dropped John like he was a growling lap dog and grabbed Todd and forced him down too, her hand around his throat and her teeth bared in wrath that turned into amusement at her own power. But it became outrage when they attacked her together, bewilderment when Todd took her life.

Now Todd had fed, and he turned on John, frantically angry, and slammed his feeding hand into him.

There was so much life it was overwhelming, washing John’s vision with light, flooding his other senses, crashing into him all of a sudden so that he was caught inside the roar and the rush of blood, the hand holding him holding him under. It was like coming up in the confusion of surf, glad to find the sky even as the water kept on pounding him. It was coming home and not being ready for the noise and the color and the familiarity—for supermarkets and riotous front yards, for the sun on stained glass. 

It surged and surged through him, without control, jerking his body around, more intense than anything that had happened with Todd before. 

But out on the other side, where it had left him flat on his back, his heart pounded and raced, and John thought he could hear the echo of voices, the Queen’s and Todd’s and a chorus of others, Teyla’s maybe, and maybe even his own. Then it was just Todd’s, and it was Todd’s aloud, speaking his name, contrite and fearful, kind of rough. 

John tried to focus on him. His sight started clearing of the black patches, which were tinged with edges too bright to have any color. 

And all of a sudden he had to laugh, even if it risked Todd’s temper again—because for the first time, he thought they might get out of this, even if he didn’t know what welcome he would get if he went back to Atlantis; because finally, Todd looked like something better than death warmed over. Except that his hair was all over the place like a mad professor’s, like someone from the science department who had stayed up too late on way too much coffee and gray-market Air Force stimulants. 

Todd looked astonished, and then he started laughing too, like he could see himself in John’s eyes, or more probably because he also realized they were going to make it. That knowledge had to feel good. Whatever it had taken.

When they were done, Todd picked him up, and they got the hell out of that Wraith facility. 

It was farther to the Stargate than John had walked since they’d gotten here. He struggled along with Todd supporting him, past the spot where he’d looked into the sea, past the landscape he hadn’t seen when it was night, when he’d been the one carrying Todd, doing his best to save him even when he half didn’t really know why. 

At the Stargate, Todd dialed Atlantis. The address was obvious; John had landed the city in the ocean where he’d first found her, his whole body understanding what it meant the moment he stepped through even if he didn’t know it yet, his body remembering and putting her back where they belonged. He still had his GDO in his breast pocket with his mission patches: he transmitted his obsolete IDC, but then he hesitated, staggering in place, breathing hard. 

“Go back to your teammates. They are your brothers too—Ronon Dex, Rodney McKay, even Teyla Emmagan, my ersatz Queen. They will forgive you for doing what you had to do. Live,” Todd said, “and I will too.”

* * *

The ZPM came through the gate, rolling across the floor like a bottle of Champagne. A wire cage much like the one over a Champagne cork protected the delicate crystalwork. It traveled in a sardonically straight, slow line and checked out fine in diagnostics—in fact, it was nearly full—so any cavalier mistreatment could be forgiven.

“Is this another gift for me?” John Sheppard asked over his radio connection. He looked into the open event horizon. 

"What, he's sending presents now?" McKay exclaimed incredulously, but he was already on the gate room floor, greedy fingers on the coveted prize.

“You sound much improved,” Todd commented as reply, approving and solicitous, and almost jovial. “Your teammates care for you well.”

“It's good to be home,” John said.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for your patience, [aristossachaion](/users/aristossachaion)! Your prompts were so inspiring. I wanted to take the time to do justice to the story that arose from them. I've loved this deep dive; there is so much here to tell. I hope it's worth the wait!
> 
> And thanks to mods [starrybouquet](/users/starrybouquet) and [koolkatfieri](koolkatfieri) for organizing this exchange and being so helpful!


End file.
